MrJennings

In our English work this week we have thought about the characters in the Grandpa Chatterji novel and how the author developed the character of Grandpa Leicester in the episode in which he meets Grandpa Chatterji. We considered the character's actions, what he says, the way he speaks and the effect he has on other characters.

Our maths has mainly focused on percentages. This has included developing our understanding of percentages as parts of a hundred and also relating them to fractions and decimals.

Our other two main activities this week have been our study of the Gurdwara and our Technology work. In RE we have used video and reference texts to find out about the Sikh Gurdwara. We have used this information to create a PowerPoint presentation including photographs of different parts of a Gurdwara and noting what is illustrated in the photo of that part of the building, what people do there, why they do it and the significance of this for Sikh people. We have had two technology sessions and many of us now have two cams on the axle of our automaton and have made a start on constructing the parts for the cam followers.

We have continued with our English work based on the Grandpa Chatterji book, thinking about aspects of Indian culture introduced into the story line, working on increasing the variety of punctuation in our own writing and re-writing an episode of the story from the point of view of one of the characters (the children's mother). Our work in maths has involved investigations about two and three dimensional shapes and nets as well as number work (focusing on division).

We have spent some time on our design technology project. We have drawn out and labeled our final designs, completed the frame which will support our automata and constructed the main axle mechanism.

In our latest unit of work in music, we have used tuned and untuned percussion instruments to compose, modify, practice and perform short pieces of music in small groups and have listened to music from different parts of the world and different periods of history, drawing and writing about them.

Our science work has concentrated on developing practical skills - in particular those involved in planning our own experiments. We have planned our own investigations, ensuring that they were fair tests by recording the factor we were going to change and the factors we were going to ensure were kept the same from test to test.

We have started a new unit of work in English, based on stories from cultures other than our own. The main text for us is Grandpa Chatterji by Jamila Gavin. We have read the first chapter and thought about the way that the family prepared for grandfather's visit and the things that grandpa brought with him. Grandpa said, "I am a snail, my dear." to his granddaughter and we have considered what he meant by this.

Our maths work has focussed on division calculations. We have thought about the meaning of the remainder and how to tell when and whether it should be rounded up or down in maths problems. We have also tried writing the remainder as a fraction.

Another significant piece of work this week was making our start on this half-term's technology project. This is about automata and we began by looking at videos of automata, discussing how they work and making drawings and notes about these. We have learned about cams and started to plan our own automaton and design the cam mechanism to produce the desired motion.